Open Tech Today - Top Stories

Friday, January 20, 2006

Denmark's Hard Disk radio program will air an interview by Anders Høeg Nissen with me and John Gotze, a member of the Open ePolicy Group, this weekend. We will talking about open standards, ODF and the openization of ICT ecosystems.

The program is already available online here. The show is mainly in Danish, but my comments are in english.

That was a topic of discussion. We believe that it is not relevant to the openness of the standard. All the definition says about this is:"The documentation must be published in an ordinary way."

Which probably is a bad translation. Another would be "publish as is normally understood by 'published'".

That means that you could charge a fee for a copy of the documentation, but it would be subject only to copyright (not to patents). Others would be free to write their own technical documentation of how to implement the standard. Libraries would be able to provide free access to the standard.

Of course, the ideal would be that the official documentation was freely distributable, but that would rule out several ISO standards which are otherwise open. (such as ISO 3166-1).We also felt that convincing organisations like ISO to make their standards freely available on the Internet was orthogonal to the issue of ensuring open standards in public infrastrucure.

That was a topic of discussion. We believe that it is not relevant to the openness of the standard. All the definition says about this is:"The documentation must be published in an ordinary way."

Which probably is a bad translation. Another would be "publish as is normally understood by 'published'".

That means that you could charge a fee for a copy of the documentation, but it would be subject only to copyright (not to patents). Others would be free to write their own technical documentation of how to implement the standard. Libraries would be able to provide free access to the standard.

Of course, the ideal would be that the official documentation was freely distributable, but that would rule out several ISO standards which are otherwise open. (such as ISO 3166-1).We also felt that convincing organisations like ISO to make their standards freely available on the Internet was orthogonal to the issue of ensuring open standards in public infrastrucure.